Ken Ham: Creationism or Panspermia

You’ve all heard of Panspermia, which Wikipedia defines as: “the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids, and, also, by spacecraft in the form of unintended contamination by microorganisms. … Panspermia is not meant to address how life began, just the method that may cause its distribution in the Universe.”

They also describe Directed panspermia, which is “the deliberate transport of microorganisms in space to be used as introduced species on lifeless planets. Directed panspermia may have been sent to Earth to start life here, or may be sent from Earth to seed exoplanets with life.”

If we had the technological ability, it’s the sort of thing we might want to do, so it’s easy to imagine that if some other intelligent species existed out there, they might do the same thing. It’s conceivable that life on Earth originated that way, but that’s a speculative idea. For reasons that will become apparent, it’s taken seriously by Ken Ham (ol’ Hambo), the ayatollah of Appalachia.

According to Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Intelligent Design should be taught in schools — just not in the way you might think. In an article for the Boston Globe, he writes that teaching students that God created is pseudoscience, but we can — and should — teach them that maybe aliens seeded life on earth.

Hambo is talking about this article: A better theory of intelligent design. It uses the expression “intelligent design” in reference to deliberate panspermia, not the creationist babbling of the Discoveroids — which the author dismisses along with biblical creationism. We saw the article when it appeared a few days ago, but we mostly write about creationism, so we ignored it. Hambo, however, is outraged. He says:

So believing that God created the universe is “pseudoscience,” but the idea that aliens brought life to earth is a “tenable theory” that is “scientifically grounded”? …. Secularists are happy to accept the idea that aliens brought life to earth even though there is absolutely no evidence for life in outer space — not even “simple” microbial life, let alone intelligent aliens capable of sending life to earth!

Then he tells us why those “secularists” are wrong:

But appealing to intelligent aliens doesn’t even solve the issue of how life originated; it merely pushes it back a step. So how did these “earth-seeding aliens” come about? Were they seeded by another set of intelligent aliens? And where did those aliens come from? Is it aliens all the way down the line? Secularists always ask, “Where did God come from?” All the while, they ignore Scripture that says God is eternal, and apparently don’t follow their own rhetoric when it comes to aliens.

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! No, it’s not “aliens all the way down.” At some point, it’s assumed that if they exist, it’s because life evolved from organic material on their homeworld, just as we assume it may have happened here — but the aliens may have arrived early in the galaxy’s history and seeded our world before it produced life on its own. Either way, the assumption is that life began — somewhere — as a natural process. Quite different from Hambo’s view of things. He continues:

What this idea of directed panspermia really shows is that, when it comes to creation and evolution, the evidence is not the issue — it’s a heart issue! People simply do not want to admit that there is clearly a Creator so they invent all kinds of foolish ideas to explain away what they see. [Bible quote.] These secularists have exchanged the obvious truth of a Creator, who has revealed Himself to us in His Word, for a foolish lie about extraterrestrial life.

[I]magining life evolving by naturalistic processes here on earth or coming from a distant world is definitely an “imaginative exercise”! It’s a fairy tale. There is no scientific evidence that life can arise from nonlife here or anywhere else by natural processes — indeed this idea breaks a scientific law, the law of biogenesis that states life can only come from other life.

And there is no scientific evidence for supposed aliens. These “exercises” are simply a figment of the imagination of evolutionists who are desperate for extraterrestrial life to show that earth’s not that special or to explain the complexity of life here on earth.

No evidence? Well, it appears that there are millions of extra-solar planets out there, and a significant number of them are in the habitable zone of their star. If it happened here, it could also happen there. That’s not actual evidence for alien life, but it’s a start, and it’s far more evidence than there is for Hambo’s creationism. He babbles on a bit more, and finishes by saying:

To get answers on the true history of the universe, I encourage you to visit our Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky.

15 responses to “Ken Ham: Creationism or Panspermia”

If we had the technological ability, it’s the sort of thing we might want to do, so it’s easy to imagine that if some other intelligent species existed out there, they might do the same thing.

Though it might well be a very selfish, vandalistic thing to do. If life is extraordinarily rare in the universe, then directed panspermia might seem a reasonable gambit, but if life is common you’re running the risk that the newly introduced spores could wipe out existing ecosystems and even civilizations.

What you could do, I guess, is have your seeding program run by self-replicating Von Neumann probes. They could check out that a particular planet was (a) habitable and (b) uninhabited and then, if appropriate, let fly with the spores.

Secularists always ask, “Where did God come from?” All the while, they ignore Scripture that says God is eternal…

Those darn secularists! Can’t they read? Ancient writers were so much more knowledgeable than we are today. They knew that there was an undetectible, eternally existing, completely omnipotent, non-physical intelligence (albeit one with jealousy and anger issues), and luckily they wrote down what they knew so that we less knowledgeable later generations would know the truth. Unfortunately, they did not write down any insights into the forces of nature or what planets really were or even how to physically build a giant wooden boat. Maybe they just assumed everyone knew those things.

Secularists are happy to accept the idea that aliens brought life to earth even though there is absolutely no evidence for life in outer space — not even “simple” microbial life, let alone intelligent aliens capable of sending life to earth!

Actually, no. Panspermia has always been the view of a very small minority of “secularist” scientists, in large part because of the regression issue the Hamster raises.

What’s more, it wouldn’t necessarily take “aliens” to bring extraterrestrial life to Earth. There was some excitement a number of years ago over the possibility that a meteorite blasted off the surface of Mars by a huge impact on that planet might have carried Martian microbes to this planet. It came to nothing, but the point is that alien life might reach Earth by natural means.